Proposed mechanisms for Cenozoic landscape evolution in southwestern North America (SWNA) include crustal isostasy, dynamic topography, or lithosphere tectonics, but their relative contributions remain controversial.

Last week's Woods Point earthquake in Victoria was a quite a surprise for most Australians outside the geophysical community and even among Earth scientists, an event of this magnitude was unexpected.

On the morning of September 22, a magnitude-5.9 earthquake struck approximately 130 km northeast of Melbourne. Seismic waves were felt in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Adelaide, and as far south as Tasmania.

Australian earthquakes pose a high consequence – low likelihood risk that is widespread across the continent but is often not well characterised for some of Australia’s most important infrastructure.

In Eastern Asia, Jurassic and Cretaceous intraplate volcanism and magmatism differ in their spatial distribution and composition. A combination of plate kinematic and geodynamic models provides clues for their causes.

This is a transcript of a podcast with Oliver Strimpel from GeologyBites. We chat about the challenges and benefits of reconstructing Earth evolution over a billion years.

We have developed a novel data-driven approach to reconstruct precipitation patterns through geological time, since the supercontinent Pangea was in existence. Our approach involves linking climate-sensitive sedimentary deposits such as coal, evaporites and glacial deposits to a global plate model, reconstructed paleo-elevation maps and high-resolution General Circulation Models via Bayesian machine learning.

Continents host the oldest building blocks of the Earth's surface and keep a record of the processes that shaped it. A careful reading and high-performance computational modelling of the early, hotter Earth reveal a coming of age story.

Katie Cooper, Rebecca Farrington and Meghan Miller explain how cratonic lithosphere can be sculpted by flow from a passing subducting slab.

Figure: Photographed on Kangaroo Island, this rock – called a ‘zebra schist’ – deformed from flat-lying marine sediments through being stressed by a continental collision over 500 million years ago. Dietmar Muller CC BY Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney ; Maria Seton, University of Sydney , and Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney Classical plate tectonic theory was developed in the 1960s.